The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

by W. D. Wetherell

  It took her two full days to scrape the paper off, then another day to do the sanding, so it wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that she started writing. With all the supplies Jeannie had left her there was one essential she had missed—pens—and it was only because she found a ballpoint to go along with the roller point in her purse that she didn’t need to drive to town. She had the worst handwriting of any middle school teacher in the country, so she decided to print, to take pains over it, make the words perfectly legible. She wouldn’t start so high that a ladder would be needed and she wouldn’t go so low anyone would ever have to kneel to read, and yet, with four big walls to work on, she should have more than enough room.

  She started with the roller pen from her purse, but the plaster sucked the ink in too greedily, so she immediately switched to the ballpoint which worked much better, though she often had to bring it down from the wall and shake the tip. And yet the walls still seemed greedy—no matter how fast she wrote, they constantly demanded more. Always before, writing on paper, she felt the space between words as little obstacles or hurdles, ones she could only jump by writing the most obvious banalities or cliches; now, the needed words seemed sensitive to her pauses and leapt in quickly on their own.

  It was hard pressing horizontally, not down—like using a blackboard, though all she ever wrote there were lessons where the chalk skated across the surface on its own. With the walls, she had to position her body just so, slide her fingers down the barrel of the pen from where they went normally, and the difficulty of this made her feel even closer to Beth and Dottie. My fellow contortionists! Their arms had trembled the same way hers did; their shoulders had known the same nagging pain. It was hard, she constantly had to stoop, reach, swivel and twist as she moved along the wall, and yet that other tightness, the bone-deep soreness, the weakness, the weariness of soul, all disappeared the moment she began writing.

  I played a game with Cassie when she was little. On Friday nights, as a special treat, we always went out for dinner somewhere simple, a family restaurant where they had a salad bar and brownie sundaes. Dan would meet us there late because of having to square away whatever construction job he was working on before the weekend. Cassie crayoned horses and dogs on her placemat while we waited, and that was fun for a while, but if it got really late and she had already finished her quota of rolls and crackers, I was forced to improvise.

  “Watch the people coming in,” I told her. “I bet you the cherry off your sundae that every one of them touches their face when they come through the door.”

  Her eyes danced upwards in amazement. The “Cassie dance” we called that, we saw it so often.

  “Every single one of them?”

  I nodded. “When they get in as far as the cash register and see everyone looking up. Yep, you watch. They touch their nose or ears or glasses and sometimes their chin.”

  And of course I won. This was a great revelation to Cassie, that adults could be so nervous in a fussy, impossible-to-control way. Every Friday after that she would stare over her menu at the people coming in, checking out everybody’s little tic, with a wise, knowing expression on her face a lot older than her years.

  That’s what I was thinking about when they led her into the courtroom in June, our harmless little game. And what’s more, I knew she was remembering this, too, knowing I was sitting there watching. She must have been nervous, the temptation to touch her hair or nose must have been irresistible, but she wasn’t going to give into it, that simple human weakness. She paraded in, wearing her dress uniform with the flesh-toned stockings, the tightwaisted skirt—paraded in, marching at attention, and just when I thought she was going to at least nod to us or thinly smile she stopped and snapped off a salute toward the flag. Beside it, standing three abreast behind a high metal table, the members of the court martial saluted crisply back.

  Not my girl, I remember thinking. It’s impossible to describe how savagely the thought came, and how, for the space of twenty seconds, it afforded me relief. But of course it was my girl, the uniform couldn’t hide that, nor the rigidly obedient way she stood.

  Two of the judges were majors, one was a sergeant—all three were female. The MP who followed Cassie in was female, the prosecutor was female, so for a moment it resembled an elaborate sorority initiation during which Cassie had been ordered not to smile. The lieutenant they had assigned to explain things to us was a woman, too, and the defense counsel, Captain Sosa, was the only male in the room besides Dan.

  It was a small room, with only three rows of seats. The one spectator was a young, nicely dressed woman who I immediately recognized, though without quite remembering her name. She wasn’t a reporter—she held no laptop or pad—but I had seen her face on television and if I hadn’t been so focused on Cassie I would have come up with her name a lot sooner than I did.

  What else? Pear trees out the window, the leaves looking dry and shriveled, though it was only June. The air-conditioning blowing too strong, so even the majors shivered. A tornado warning on the wall telling us where to run if sirens went off. Dan reaching to find my hand, me tugging it back from him. The cricket chirp of the stenographer’s machine. A sign over the judges’ table, Fort Sill Oklahoma, in flowing cowboy script.

  The whole atmosphere stayed calm, as if the tornado had come and gone and we the survivors must quietly go about our business. Like that—and like it had all been rigidly choreographed, and everyone, even Dan and me, were playing our assigned parts.

  The reporters, cameramen, bloggers and journalists had already left town. Cassie wasn’t pretty enough, her crime wasn’t sufficiently brutal, to capture their interest. It had been the first series of trials, the general court martials held a week ago, that had created all the excitement—Cassie was small potatoes in comparison. She had not tied any of her prisoners to a leash or covered their heads in panties or pissed on the Koran or sodomized them with a broomstick or forced them to adopt “stress positions” while country music blared through peanut-butter covered pods taped to their ears. She had not been stationed at Abu Ghraib prison nor played a role in the crimes committed there. As a guard with the 363rd Military Police company of the 500th MP Brigade, U.S. Army Reserve, she had been assigned to watch the overflow prisoners who had been sent to a detention center near the city of Al-Kut—Camp Patterson, called by the MPs “Camp Patty.”

  While on duty there, guarding what few female prisoners Patty held, she had gotten a call on her cell phone from a sergeant telling her to hurry down to Tier One Alpha. This same sergeant had asked her to play pool the night before and she had said no. Now, afraid she had hurt his feelings, she said she would be right down.

  When she got there, he and his fellow sergeants led her to a shower stall at the end of the cell block. A dead Iraqi lay there in a pool of crusted blood. All night he had been subjected to an interrogation that involved not only beatings but a handler holding back a barking, snarling German shepherd inches from his face. He snapped under this. When the interrogators finally left to get breakfast, he began pounding his head against the cement wall of the shower stall and continued doing so until he was dead.

  After wrapping him in ice, the sergeants called their friends among the other guards asking if they wanted to pose next to him for a souvenir photo before they carted him off on a waiting gurney. Cassie had been one of three soldiers who posed.

  At the judges’ table one of the shivering majors finally had enough—he waved the MP over to adjust the air-conditioning, which she did but only by standing on a chair. In the interval, the lieutenant assigned to explain things to us, Lieutenant Vidic, leaned over our laps and rapidly whispered.

  “They’ll be asking for her plea. It’s not dereliction of duty since it wasn’t her prisoner and the incident wasn’t even on her tier. That’s why it’s only a special court martial, not a general. It comes down to whether or not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice she engaged in conduct bringing discredit to the military.”
r />   “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Dan said, reaching across me to shake her hand. That was the fourth time he had done that since we arrived at the courtroom, shake her hand. Dan is stolid, he can do stolid so well, but right then at that moment what I needed was an agonized husband, a trembling husband, a husband on the verge of breaking down at what had happened to his girl.

  “Guilty,” Cassie said, the moment the air-conditioning quieted.

  She looked tiny as ever, standing by the much taller MP. Doll-sized, barely one hundred pounds, with the bangs she had worn since she was seven exaggerating the effect even more. She was always forgetting to put her contacts in, and the only expression on her face was the vaguest of squints. Other than that? I could see her acne was better. She looked like she had been eating okay. I didn’t like the rigid way she stood at attention.

  Between us and the front sat the woman I mentioned, so I had to look past her shoulder in order to see Cassie. She was not much more than twenty-five or twenty-six, dressed in an attractive brown suit that made her look like a businesswoman, crisp and very competent, though her frizzy red hair suggested something wilder. She sat formally, with her hands on her lap the way people do at funerals. Some stirring of the pear trees outside caught the light and she looked sideways toward the window. It was the kind of open face you immediately like, and the openness came mostly from her wide and caring eyes. Again, I wondered where I had seen her, and why, with no one else looking on, she had brought that look of sympathy to Cassie’s trial.

  As well as being choreographed down to the slightest detail, the trial moved very fast. The prosecuting officer and the defense counsel approached the judges with papers they dealt across the table like cards.

  Lieutenant Vidic cupped her hand over her mouth and whispered:

  “The prosecution goes first, now that they’re proceeding to the sentencing phase. She’ll be presenting matters of aggravation, things that tend to worsen the offense.”

  It was a photo she had placed in front of each judge, and I didn’t have to be handed one to know what it showed. A young Iraqi man, detainee #143488 according to a sign balanced across his chest, wrapped in ice bags with bright red and green Arabic lettering. The ice bags packed right up to his chin, pressing it backwards like an icy bib, making it look like he was staring up at something stuck on the ceiling well behind him. Unshaven, his beard the same brown color as his skin, his nose and cheeks caked in blood, his mouth rigidly open. Eyes covered in duct tape. A body bag wrinkled beneath him like a sheet he had kicked aside. Black pointy hood like a sorcerer’s flopping sideways toward his ear. Behind him, closer to the cement wall, a white plastic lawn chair, the kind you can buy at any mall. A fuzzy football-shaped something underneath its legs.

  Squatting by his head, leaning over to make sure she posed in the same frame, Cassie. Brown t-shirt tucked into baggy camouflage pants, sand-colored with scattered chocolate-chip dabs. Green plastic glove. Big smile on her face, beautiful smile, the smile of someone who had never looked so beautiful, vivacious and incandescent before. The best photo of her ever taken.

  The prosecutor, now that all three judges were staring down at it, felt confident enough to step back from the table.

  “Please notice the defendant is not just passively posing, but makes a thumbs-up gesture to the camera while Sergeant Mendoza takes the picture with—” She glanced down at her pad. “Sony Cyber Shot Three camera. The prosecution contends that this gratuitous and vindictive gesture brings even more discredit upon the military than alleged in the original charge.”

  The defense counsel, who until now had seemed content to let the women run the show, cleared his throat.

  “This can not be considered an aggravating factor, since it was merely the defendant’s habitual nervous gesture. Specialist Savino is often very shy and never knows what to do with her hands in a photo, and this is where the thumbs-up gesture originates from.”

  Dan leaned over to our lieutenant. “That’s true,” he whispered. He straightened back up, whispered now to me. “You know that’s true.” The major in the center pointed the prosecutor back to her seat. “Matters of mitigation?” she said, waving the defense counsel up in her place.

  “Thank you, Major Adams. The guard dog involved in the incident became very agitated in the course of the night, to the point he was impossible to soothe, even by his handler. It was the defendant, Specialist Savino, who calmed him down and returned him to the kennel, thereby removing a potential threat from the tier. She stayed with the dogs all morning, talking to them and stroking them to make sure they remained passive. Every officer in camp marveled at her influence with dogs.”

  The sergeant judge now spoke for the first time.

  “This is mitigation?”

  “We believe that it is.”

  The major stood up. “Ten minutes before sentencing.”

  There was no reason to leave our seats. The judges disappeared out a side door which no one bothered closing. Cassie stood at ease, but still didn’t look at us. Dan got up to flex his bad back. The clock on the wall ticked. The woman in front of us sat staring down at her hands, then turned suddenly around, like she was going to say something. Too late. Cassie, the prosecutor, the defense counsel, the stenographer and MP guard. They all stood to attention as the judges filed back in.

  The sergeant had been chosen to read out the sentence. It was her big moment and she milked it for all it was worth—her voice wouldn’t have been so deep and stern if Cassie had committed genocide.

  “Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Specialist Cassie Savino, for conduct bringing discredit to the military, is sentenced to thirty days in the stockade, reduction in rank to private, and the forfeiture of half a month’s pay.”

  Cassie saluted, turned ninety degrees and saluted her defense counsel, swiveled and saluted the prosecutor, then followed the MP out the door.

  “That’s that,” Dan said, slapping his hands together.

  Out in the lobby our lieutenant stood explaining what would happen next—Cassie’s sentence would be served right here in Fort Sill, she said—when the MP came over and pulled her aside.

  “Let’s go,” I said, but Dan wouldn’t budge.

  “Thirty days seems fair,” he said. “Those Abu Ghraib guards got much more.”

  “Thirty days for smiling?”

  “Someone told her to smile. You pose for a picture, the one who’s taking it says ‘Smile!’ Anyway, it doesn’t have anything to do with smiling, you know that as well as I do.”

  Dan closed his eyes, made a half-pucker with his lips, as if he were trying to squeeze something from his mouth that didn’t come naturally.

  “It’s thirty days for defending her country. Thirty days for standing up for what’s right. You think those detainees are Boy Scouts? They’re killing our boys and it’s a lucky thing they didn’t kill her. She’s over there on a mission and the mission sometimes involves things you and I can’t stomach, but so what? You remember 9/11, how we didn’t take our eyes off the TV for a solid week. That’s two thousand reasons right there. If some raghead terrorist takes it into his head to kill himself I don’t see why anyone over here should care.”

  I remember 9/11, I felt like saying. I remember how before that you were so funny and skeptical when it came to politics or world events, how you would always be on the side of the underdog, the army and generals and president could all fuck themselves as far as you were concerned—and how, that September night when we finally tore ourselves away from the television and went up to bed, you stopped by the window, looked out across the lawn and said “God bless America,” not ironically, not as a joke, but with all the sincerity and passion your soul was capable of.

  “Mrs. Savino?”

  Our lieutenant was back. She came over and hesitated—it was obvious she wanted to talk to me alone.

  “Cassie would like you to come see her tomorrow morning before you leave for home. She’s allowed half an hour, but I think we ca
n extend this some. It would have to be early. Is eight okay? The stockade abuts the south gate.”

  Dan nodded. “We’ll be there.”

  “Cassie asked for her mother to come alone.”

  That’s why the lieutenant looked so agonized, but her distress was nothing compared to the look that came across Dan’s face. Crushed is too mild a word—his face jerked sideways like he’d been slapped.

  “No problem,” he said, smiling, and I know what that cost him. “We want to thank you again for all your help, Lieutenant. If you rotate back there, give them hell.”

  When we were alone again he took my arm.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “I’d like to walk.”

  “In this heat? We have the car.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  His face reddened. A little thing, but coming after the tension of the trial, his disappointment, it was exactly what could set him off.

  “Okay,” he said softly.

  “It must be a woman thing,” I said. Stupid of me, but I couldn’t think of how else to lessen his hurt.

  “That’s fine. The two of you can have a good talk. Did you notice she didn’t turn around and look at us, not once?”

  I told him to be careful with the traffic and he told me to be careful walking in that sun. A marble staircase led down to the first floor, just like in a real courthouse. Once through the revolving door he turned left toward the parking lot, and I was still standing there trying to get my bearings when someone stepped out from the shadows along the wall.

  “Mrs. Savino? My name is Pam Cord.”

  “I know who you are,” I said.

  In the courtroom, I’d gotten the impression of someone tall, which must have been from the formal way she sat, because I saw now she was shorter than me, maybe even shorter than Cassie. The sun brought the red out in her hair, and, seeing me stare, she patted it like someone putting out a fire.